As Above, So Below
by L. S. Popovich
Dear Rosie,
In the town where I grew up, the evening settled over quiet parks, found me in the baseball field trading cards after school, or on the street with my pants sagging and my feet dragging. Like the moon, I snuck into alleys and woke up winos. Like a poltergeist, I pawed through their drenched ponchos for grubby baggies of illicit dope; in those days, we were ready to shove anything up our noses. We were trying to relive a past we’d never experienced, chasing away boredom with migraines, but the giddiness only shrouded a hopeless stupor.
In the city I knew, the doorways were full of laughing people. In the passages of abandoned churches, birds sang as if they believed in kingdoms in the sky. In the pool halls, sneaking beers, the conversations ran late into the night and leaked into the eerie haloes of parking lots, those somehow elegant wastelands where abandoned cars with cracked windscreens waited for ghost lovers.
What happened to those nights, when drunkenness polished our wits, and sad, lonesome regrets trickled into our inertia with the coming of high noon? When the sun reached its zenith, we ogled birds perched on crooked roof gutters, beneath bountiful peach trees. We hearkened to their mournful chirping.
If our hearts were still innocent, we might roam weed-blighted hills, marveling breathlessly at the cloudless dome. This was our home, our youth, tinged with treacly nostalgia as the gears ground into adulthood, that surreal Brady Bunch technicolor dreamlike aura.
And then the descent of chaos. All at once we were grown, technology ruled our lives, and the disease of human frailty cast our hopes into the pit of despair. We were cracked, starved and maniacal.
Look at us now. Our salvation lies below ground, in self-sufficient vaults. Whatever they say about the New-Fangled Great Plague, the collapse of Hoboland America, my overtaxed imagination confirms the harried prophecies of those drunks I once pickpocketed. I never asked to be saved from that nescience which might allow us to perish in celibate isolation.
The past two years have eroded my decorum. I forgot to ask how you’re doing. And Clayton. How big is he now?
But then, I already know. I can’t look in the mirror, either, that liminal plane in which I glimpse the ravaged Other. Mankind was swept off the face of the Earth by a chain reaction of animalcules so subtle and indifferent.
What do we know of cures? There is no cure for sleep. Neither is there hope for insomniacs.
The wanton destruction of beauty, the squashed and smothered potential, obliterated childhood fantasias trodden into dust, prolapsed souls escaping through the defective ozone layer.
Humanity puts on its grave-clothes. I assume it’s daylight outside your window — in space, the sun never sets — without a hint of Boschian dénouement. All we have are blackened fingernails and holey teeth.
The refrigerator-shaped administrators assure me I’ll see you again one day, in some other form.
Until that time, don’t forget your promise.
Your devoted lover?
Claude
* * *
Dearest Rosie,
How quaint it is underground. The chaps from England convinced you I was one of the glowing skelingtons, didn’t they? More accurately, picture a hairless mole in a straight-up cassock pecking at a typewriter beneath a flickering lantern. “Quaint” is not a strong enough word for these old fogeys in their robes like body-moss, the thick hair on their backs, their subhuman scrounging through head-high mounds of pulpy parchment.
You think I’ve got a head full of cankerworms, don’t you? I was born an exile. They say solitude bolsters inner reserves of energy. At these times I admire Mother Earth: her frozen majesty, her heart of roiling iron. The hallways here are treacherous tapestries of twisted metal and compressed plywood.
A society built from mediocrity lingers but is not remembered. Alas, our ghosts hollow out the world, adorning unknowable chasms with Benedictine attention to detail. It’s just a Precious jubilee down below.
The slow resolution of time is to lacquer Man’s ineptitude. Consider the forbidding heavens: a sky pitch black, peppered with taunting stars, forever beyond the limit of our reach, many receding at a speed approaching that of light.
I have devious encounters with the moon down here, in dreams, and dance with my own shadow, pretending the baby-shaped bundle of socks is Clayton. There are no real children here, only imaginary ones.
For how long, my tempestuous mistress
I wander coiling corridors,
Dogging the footsteps of phantom children.
Old men in these caverns moan, astir, chanting in dead languages, tinkling as they step, with bones of glass. In rocky chambers, warmed by ancient, roaming veins of magma, it’s not difficult to forget the invisible world above, which appears alien through our terrascopes. Our past lives were a dream, trampled by a Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Until my eyes grow accustomed to the dark awareness in the sallow faces inhabiting these windowless depths, remember me as I was. Do me this favor, Rose, my mortar, in which the dust of my rotting bones is pounded. My feeble poesy is reduced, and the iridescent ring around the rim, scented sweet, an essence of me, smokes eerily.
Yours Thru Eternity,
Claude
* * *
Dear Rose,
Incredible how they raise up the infantile fantasist Lovecraft here. A cult of absurdist madmen, calling into the molten chasms and rendering sacrifices to a god they cannot fathom. Makes me wonder if that infernal author is looking down on us, laughing from his asylum in the sky.
I give them a wide berth, play along, saying, “Hail Yug-sothoth!” All these drooling monks, well-bred male chauvinists, and these frigid females tethered together in cliques: is this really a representative group? Or did the sane people refuse to sign the waiver?
Makes me worry if future archeologists discover our remains. They would assume we were sunken-eyed, pale albinos scratching heavenward like star-nosed moles. We are mooncalves, picking through the dross of supplies and making expeditions to the surface in our spacesuits to wander the knife-like skyscrapers draped against the background of nebula and unfiltered trillions of stars. But eventually, we’ll all go blind.
You probably hear enough preaching on your space station’s equivalent of the street corner. In times of famine and pestilence, the best way to make a living is to preach. My lone shelf is adorned with a battered edition of Shakespeare and a Gideon’s Bible, like some cheap hotel room. Anything more modern than the Renaissance is denigrated in this hermetic dungeon. A few anachronisms float around, like my Royal typewriter, but the colony doesn’t believe in convenience.
You may envy my earthbound existence, but I’m merely a ghost, haunting you while you drift like a specter through an inexorable orbit. Your track is fixed, and my pathways are limited to these crumbling, crowded tunnels in this human anthill. We laughed off the cataclysm, and now I hole up in this subterranean prison, this bunker of occult ceremonies and self-flagellation.
Had I stayed with you, in your room with a view of the untouchable Earth, I would’ve festered under your gaze, stifled by the filtered air. Instead, I’ll send these plaintive missives up the space elevator, awaiting the unlikely reply, if the bloody thing still works.
Here, my fingers disintegrate. Soon my limbs will drop off like the statues you view through your on-board telescope, those flash-frozen remnants of our race.
Had we lingered in the petrified cities, we could’ve sat arm-in-stub as the flames engulfed us. Instead, we parted after such a bitter disagreement. Now, I lie on my hard cot night after night, coughing out leprotic spores into slimy rags, regretting the faith you had in me before the quarantines, the solitudinous hours fading into an unnoticeable death like a slow succumbing to anesthesia. How I long to clasp your untainted flesh — a rose or a flower by any name — and my heart would burst, my boils and fissures would become sweet blossoms. Until your healthsome light shines on me, I am a living pustule.
With longing,
Claude
* * *
Gawd, Claudie,
You always were such a blathermouth. They report lifespans in the catacombs are no shorter than ours. Science ain’t good enough to combat bone loss and food shortage.
By the way, the baby is happy. His feet are crooked, but you can get around alright without a few limbs up here on account of the low gravity.
Never knew the end of the world would look so beautiful from this porthole. The baby’s crying. My smuggled smokes don’t agree with him. The sun setting behind the Earth is like a cigarette in my eye. The clouds below are like cloth diapers on a space-food diet. See, you’re not the only one who can write poetry.
They invented a new breed called “moon cactus” in the greenhouse. I wanted to call it Galactus Cactus. They’re selling ’em door-to-door, bragging how they can grow in zero grav so long as you water ’em once a month.
Lucky you. I’d take yer cave over this air-conditioned coffin. Too little, too late. Should’ve listened to me, Claudie. Tho, it’s probably easier to tolerate one another with this distance between us. We never did get along in that shanty, nor that plague shelter.
You know, I kinda admired the big ol’ planet before she betrayed us. By Jove, wish you could see the lightning from here.
I hate to tell you, but the orbit is compromised. Without boosters from below every few months, we will enter a slow death spiral. Earth will be the eye of the storm that will swallow us. I read about it in the ship newsletter. They predicted exactly when it would happen and arranged a feast to enjoy our last moments. No one panicked, because they knew it wouldn’t do any good.
It was cruel to bring an infant into this doomed world, they tell me. For this, they call me every name in the book. But when I think of my baby’s brief life, the little joys he experienced, I’m filled with gratitude. It’s better to exist for a short time, in innocence, than to have never existed at all.
Love,
Rosie
* * *
Dear Rose,
The Earth was always a prison, but the land was luxurious enough to provide a solid stage for our brief performance. A slapstick act if there ever was one, with its illusion of permanence.
We speculate about who will be the last one alive down here. That howling-mad loner will have to bury the rest of his comrades and await the dissolution of his mortal coil. But who will know if he performs his sworn duty to provide a dignified burial to us?
Oh, brave desolation, which harbors such uncertainty. How like death, is living in knowledge of mortality.
Death has been personified before our eyes, stalking the ruins above. We catch glimpses through our pitiful terrascope of his pale figure looming through the wastelands. He searches under rocks, in deep caves, hunting, waiting to see if we’ll emerge. They call him the Plague, since we carry his likeness on our faces, into our oubliette to accompany us in our wretched convalescence. He cannot bear the sunlight, so he trails a black cloak. The grass withers in his wake.
I visualize you up there, unbelieving, nurturing a floating cactus. Has the red thread of my fate finally snapped? Everything I have strived for and loved, boiled down to its precipitate, is you and little Clayton, that burbling, bald ball of clay, swaddled at your breast. If only we were all so lucky as to blindly trust some benevolent force, some giant, all-knowing entity to fulfill our every need. He cannot help loving you. Instead, we must cry out to eternity and receive silence for an answer.
Claude
Copyright © 2025 by L. S. Popovich
